The OpenCPN developer community is happy to announce the availability of vector chart sets tailored for OpenCPN.

A chart plotter without charts resembles a fish out of water. Up-to-date and affordable quality charts are fresh water for OpenCPN and are a welcome addition to the OpenCPN ecosystem.

Three years ago we started to close the availability gap by deploying the S-63 plug-in in order to get access to official charts from chart providers all over the world.
This successful experience - with limited scope due to the price policy for official charts - encouraged us to look further providing up-to-date and quality charts for OpenCPN.

We can announce today that the oeSENC chart sets are now available from the same channel as the S-63 UserPermits: o-charts.org

oeSENC charts are plain vector charts licensed from Hydrographic Offices, packaged, produced and licensed for an individual system or PC.
For Windows, Linux (Intel and ARM) and macOS.

The sets can't be free and therefore we are trying hard to keep the overhead as low as possible.
oeSENC charts are bare bone charts, built from the complete portfolio available from the Hydrographic Offices. They are not intended to compete with value added offers from other chart suppliers, such as from VistMyHarbor or the NV sets. The OCPN plug-ins for POIs such as SquidIO can fill gaps for pleasure craft usages too.

The chart sets are licensed for one year including approximately quarterly updates during this period.

I've been hoping something like this would happen for a while now. However, what does "bare-bones charts" mean in this context?

Just that this charts contain the content you get from the Hydrographic Offices. No further content like Points Of Interest. Plain Vector charts comparable to the S-57 charts from NOAA.
Just not official charts - a term reserved for S-63 vector charts and S-57 for US waters.

In case something got broken during the file transfer - what shall not crash the utility neither - what about to download the chart set once again?

Hubert

1 - Due to a misunderstanding from my part (re installing the charts on two different computers, I did not get that I needed a different fingerprint), I have already a second download of the charts. I will try it

2 - FWIW: having a double boot in my PC (W8.1 + Ubuntu 16.02), I tried uploading these charts in O under Ubuntu (using the W fingerprint) I obviously get a message saying that the key is invalid but the charts seem processed succesfully without freeze (but obviously are not displayed).
Would that point out to a problem with W ?